BBC veterans require skilled hands to massage their innards

TNMOC asks for help maintaining its fleet of Beeb Micros

The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) has made an appeal for volunteers who could help them keep their BBC Micro computers – which the museum uses to give visiting young'uns a taste of hacking history – in good health.

TNMOC is looking for people familiar with the BBC Micro computer and its peripherals, as it is seemingly short of steady hands itself.

The 8-bit BBC, launched on 1 December 1981, epitomised the British home computer boom of the early 1980s. The venerable Beeb was given a writeup on The Register for its 30th birthday.

It has long occupied a darling slot in the mumbled rememberings of our more senior citizenry, and has even been rebuilt in JavaScript.

TNMOC says it gets more than 4,500 students a year on its Learning Programme and many of them are tasked with using an original 1980s BBC computer to hack a computer games program – perhaps gaining their first experience of coding in the process.